WOMEN POETS, FEMINISM AND THE SONNET IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY- FIRST CENTURIES: AN AMERICAN NARRATIVE by JADE CRADDOCK A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham April 2013 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Marion Thain, for helping me realise this thesis. Thanks also go to Deborah Longworth for stepping in and seeing the project through to completion, and Dick Ellis for providing a valuable perspective. I am extremely grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for providing funding for my thesis, enabling me to concentrate fully on the project. During my research, I have relied on the help of a number of poets to uncover the breadth of women’s sonneteering in the contemporary era: Kim Bridgford, Andrea Carter Brown, Sarah Busse, Melissa Cannon, Wanda Coleman, Martha Collins, Denise Duhamel, Sarah Gorham, Susan Gubernat, Heidi Hart, Lyn Hejinian, Julie Kane, Sylvia Kantaris, Tatyana Mishel, Harryette Mullen, Wanda Phipps, Denise Riley, Stephanie Strickland, Marilyn L. Taylor and Kathrine Varnes. My thanks also to Marsha Bryant, Nancy Honicker, Stacy Hubbard, Lynn Keller and David Knox for providing me with their essays. Thanks go to all of those poets and executors who have allowed me to cite poems in full in the thesis, including: Holly Peppe, literary executor for Edna St.Vincent Millay, Claire Reinertsen, Copyright & Permissions Manager, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc./Liveright Publishing Corp. for citation of Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, Marilyn Nelson and Erica Bossier, Permissions Co-ordinator, LSU Press, Moira Egan, Tatyana Mishel, and Juliana Spahr. Special mention must go to Moira Egan, Marilyn Nelson, and Marilyn Hacker who proved to be especially accommodating and helpful. The following permissions have been granted: "Bluebeard" (c) 1917, 1945 by Edna St. Vincent Millay 'Gazing upon him now, severe and dead (c) 1923, 1951 by Edna St. Vincent Millay “Yet in an hour to come, disdainful dust” (c) 1931, 1958 by Edna St. Vincent Millay Reprinted with permission of Holly Peppe, Literary Executor, The Millay Society. "The Insusceptibles" and the lines from "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" are reprinted from COLLECTED EARLY POEMS: 1950-1970 by Adrienne Rich, by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright (c) 1993, 1967, 1963, 1955 by Adrienne Rich. Poem VI of "Twenty-One Love Poems" is reprinted from THE FACT OF A DOORFRAME: Selected Poems 1950-2001 by Adrienne Rich, by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright (c) 2002 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright (c) 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. There have been several special teachers and tutors throughout my life who have inspired, encouraged and helped me get to where I am today and one particular piece of advice that has been my inspiration: reach for the moon and even if you miss you’ll be amongst the stars. I am grateful to these teachers for feeding my curiosity and pushing me to achieve. Finally, this thesis is dedicated to my family without whom none of this would have been possible. To my nan who takes so much pride in all that I do. To my parents for their unerring belief and support. To my brother for making me do this in the first place and to Max for being there for me throughout. With all my love. Dedication In loving memory of my grandparents. Abstract Initially developed and perfected by male poets, the history of the sonnet has been characterised by androcentrism. Yet from its inception the sonnet has also been adopted by women. In recent years feminist critics have begun to redress the form’s gender imbalance, but most studies of the female-authored sonnet have excluded the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and thus one of the most important periods in women’s history – the rise of feminism – leading to a flawed narrative of the genre. Repositioning Edna St. Vincent Millay as the starting point in a twentieth-century tradition, this study begins where most others end and examines how the emergence and development of feminism, specifically in an American context, underscores a significant female narrative of the sonnet that emerges outside of the male tradition. By reading the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker, Marilyn Nelson and Moira Egan within their specific feminist contexts and within the broader trajectory of feminism, it is possible to see how women in the era took ownership of the form. Ultimately, the thesis suggests that feminism has shaped an important narrative in the history of the genre that means today the sonnet is no longer exclusively male. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1 – EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY AND THE EMERGENCE OF A FEMINIST SONNET TRADITION ............................................................................ 31 CHAPTER 2 – FEMINIST RADICALISATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ADRIENNE RICH’S SONNETEERING .................................................................... 85 CHAPTER 3 – MARILYN HACKER AND THE SONNET IN A NEW FORMALIST AGE...................................................................................................................... ..130 CHAPTER 4 – WOMEN-OF-COLOUR FEMINISM AND THE SONNETS OF MARILYN NELSON ............................................................................................... 177 CHAPTER 5 – MOIRA EGAN AND THE SONNET IN THE POSTFEMINIST AGE........................................................................................................................ 226 CONCLUSION – THE FEMALE-AUTHORED SONNET IN THE FEMINIST FOURTH WAVE? .................................................................................................. 286 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................... 305 APPENDIX A – FEMALE SONNETEERS FOR A FEMINIST NARRATIVE OF THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES ........................................ 350 LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1: AFTER ROGER D. HODGE (SPAHR, POWERSONNETS) ............... 296 Introduction Our silence attests…to a failure to ask the right questions about how traditional poetic forms such as the sonnet may serve the needs of women poets. (Fried 1) This thesis intends to challenge the dominant thinking on the androcentrism of the sonnet. It seeks to claim for female poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries not only greater recognition and value for their contributions to the genre, and admittance to the canon, but also the distinction of a vital tradition accessible via a feminist epistemology. Indeed, the thesis will examine how the development of feminism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a specific focus on an American context, has facilitated the development of a vital female-authored sonnet tradition that has released the genre from its patriarchal bias and made it into a legitimate and powerful female mode. In recent history feminist critics have been keen to uncover and promote female presence in the sonnet tradition. However, whilst it is accepted that women can, and have, written sonnets, theirs is still a peripheral and secondary story, with continued debate over women’s claims upon the sonnet and the gendered ideology of the genre. Some critics have suggested that because of the sonnet’s masculine tradition and phallic direction, despite her intentions and politics, the female poet who appropriates the form, inevitably ends up being implicated in the sexist ideology of the genre and failing to assert a genuine female narrative (Homans 573- 4; Jones 58). As Natasha Distiller has argued, the position of the female sonneteer 1 is something of an oxymoron (163). However, other than a cursory nod towards Edna St. Vincent Millay, studies of the female-authored sonnet have failed to address the radically transformative period of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Yet it is this period that witnessed a revolution in women’s lives, with the most sustained and successful exposure of, and challenge against, oppressive gender systems and hierarchies. The current gap in the female-authored sonnet narrative threatens to leave us with a skewed tradition and incomplete knowledge of the genre. Indeed, it is only within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (at least publically) that female sonneteers have been as prolific as male sonneteers; thus without acknowledgment of this period the sonnet will continue to be associated primarily with men. By reading the works of five American female sonneteers in light of their particular feminist contexts, the thesis will demonstrate the importance of women’s sonnets in this period. Even though it has been suggested that the sonnet can never truly escape its masculine past and